The Morning: The race to control Congress
The New York Times
Good morning. Today’s a big one for primary elections across the country, with voters heading to the polls in Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Oregon and Pennsylvania. If you’ll forgive a sports analogy, it’s like a series of playoff games. The championship — control of Congress — is in November. Let’s start there.
Map questsHistory tells us that the party in power generally loses congressional seats in midterm elections. Yesterday’s New York Times/Siena poll showed that Democrats should be in a good position to pick some up. Democrats had an 11-point lead when registered voters were asked which party’s candidate they would support for Congress — well ahead of where voters ranked Democrats earlier in this cycle, writes Nate Cohn, our chief political analyst. Currently, Republicans hold narrow majorities in both the House and the Senate. Democrats need to gain three seats in the House and four seats in the Senate to flip control of Congress. And polling is an important bellwether for their chances. But congressional maps can confound voter sentiment and polarize races, as these charts from my colleague Ashley Wu show. For Democrats in particular, they pose a problem. A month ago, the party expected a blue wave. Then the Supreme Court said a new congressional map in Louisiana, drawn to protect Black representation in Congress, was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. After that, Republican-led states across the South went to work. Louisiana is crafting a new map. Florida drew one aimed at getting rid of four seats that leaned toward Democrats. Tennessee designed one that would give Republicans an additional seat. Voters in California and Virginia opted to go in the other direction, authorizing their leaders to draw maps that would create new Democratic seats. The Supreme Court in Virginia threw out that state’s measure — and four seats for the left — early this month.
The Trump loyalty testOne race to watch closely today is the Republican primary in Kentucky, where Representative Thomas Massie, who has clashed with President Trump, is trying to keep his seat against Ed Gallrein, a challenger backed by the president. Kentucky has an unpredictable political landscape, Reid Epstein reported. It’s a deep-red state with a Democratic governor. One of its senators is an insider’s insider, Mitch McConnell, who is retiring. The other is Rand Paul, an outsider libertarian. Reid’s just terrific: Ever since Daniel Boone crossed the Cumberland Gap into what is now Kentucky, the state has served as an incubator for colorful figures who stand out for their quirks, their rejection of party orthodoxy and their national success despite long odds. Massie and Gallrein fit right into that tradition. Will voters prefer their incumbent — a libertarian-leaning maverick — or vote instead for a MAGA-aligned former Navy SEAL with a huge war chest and no experience in holding office? (Yesterday, in an unusual move, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth traveled to Kentucky to stump for Gallrein.) The result in the race, already one of the costliest this year, will be a referendum on loyalty to Trump, Robert Draper wrote. Republicans would see a Gallrein victory as evidence that the president’s hold over the party remains absolute, he said. (On Saturday, Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana lost his Republican primary after Trump backed Cassidy’s challenger. Cassidy, the party’s loudest vaccine defender, had voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial five years ago.) Massie, of course, hopes he’ll hold on. “You can send him a message,” Massie said at a campaign event last week, talking about the president. “He needs to work with me because I ain’t going anywhere.” More on today’s primaries: There are crowded races for governor in Georgia and senator in Alabama. And in Pennsylvania, a tight House contest has united the left and center flanks of the Democratic Party. Reid explains all those races, and more, here.
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